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Currently the Foundry community’s morale is at an all time low. While editing and reviewing have recently returned (yay!) plays are next to impossible to get due to a convoluted rating system and confusing search tool. After some brainstorming I believe I have come up with and idea on how to alleviate our problems.

Issues

Players are not engaged to play the Foundry
Players wishing to play Story missions are not seeing missions to play other than spotlights or the top 50 ergo authors are not getting plays unless they are spotlit or in the top 50

I can take a fair guess everyone has heard of what happen to Caspian Division and the Klingon counterpart House of Caspian. If not you can have a read of Terilyn’s Massively Column, it give a insight in what has happened.

Caspian is moving on and reformed the fleet to be Caspian Rising and Caspian Honour Guard and we have receive a lot of support of help and the fleet bank is full with great thanks to the community with there donations of items, EC an alternate characters joining and helping to grind out Fleet Marks. continue reading…

A new “Choose My Adventure” series at Massively led Eliot Lefebvre to explore two Foundry missions. In this case, he played Galactrix’s “The Syndicate Extraction” and RogueEnterprise’s “First Cause, Then Effect.” Check out his article here, and leave some feedback.

Personally, I’m disappointed that readers voted to send him back to official story content, which he found disappointing for compelling reasons. Read his follow-up article here.

Some recent experiences got me thinking about “Drive-by’s” …those pernicious “1” votes that people get on their missions. Now it must be said that “Drive-by” ratings are like blackholes, every sector has at least one, and while they all stink…they happen nonetheless, or as they say on Vulcan, “You can please some of the people some of the time, but not all the people all the time.”

Plus some people are just obnoxious Tellarites.

Anyway, this brought me to examine the 1 votes of the Spotlight and Top 32 missions to determine what mission creators should reasonably expect from the dreaded “Drive-by” ratings.

Below I’ll use the following nomenclature:
“O” = Number of One (1) votes for a mission
“P” = Number of Plays for a mission (minimum of 10)
“OP” = Ratio of O per P, a higher OP is better than a low OP.

First, the FED side.

FED Spotlight Missions had an average O of 236 over an average of 9951 P, for an OP of 42.
The Top 32 FED Missions had an average O of 18 over an average of 1068 P, for an OP of 59.
The combined averages were O/P/OP 127/5510/43.

The mean OP for Spotlight missions was 43 with a standard deviation of 16.
The mean OP for Top32 missions was 48 with a standard deviation of 25.

If the scores are normally distributed, approx. 68% of the population of missions will fall within 1 standard deviation of the mean, and 95% of the population within 2 standard deviations.

This allows us to class the OP ratings of the two categories of FED missions (Top32/Spotlight…they cannot be evaluated directly because they are effectively to different samples, the Spotlight missions obviously receiving far more “attention” per mission)

For non-spotlight FED missions, if your mission has an OP within the bounds of 23 to 73, you are receiving a normal amount of Drive-By ratings. If you are below 23 you are receiving a higher than normal amount and if your OP lands between 74 and 98 you are doing well above average. If you are above 98 you can safely consider your mission a resounding success with the player base.

By comparison, FED Spotlight missions are clearly held to a higher standard by the player base. The lower end of average is fairly equitable with non-spotlight missions, but the upper band is significantly lower, for a range of 27 to 59. Additionally, the data is tight enough that a “well below average” band comes into existence with OP’s of 11 or lower. The well above average band for Spotlight missions sits between 59 and 75, but interestingly enough none of the existing Spotlight missions falls within the outer most “excellent” band above 75.

You can really see how much harsher the upper band is if you find the differences between the Top32 and Spotlight missions for each band:

Dear anyone at Cryptic who might have the power to do this for the Foundry community,

Many of us Foundry authors like to build custom interiors. One of the biggest challenges for us relates to the lack of floors and ceilings. While we have a few walls of different factions, we have very few floors and ceilings. Mostly, we use one of these pieces, called “100 x 100 Building Block Platforms.”

Recently I released a couple missions that I’ve been working on for the past few months. One of them “The Galaxy’s Fair” is a non-combat mission and the fact that it is non combat is stated very clearly in the description. Doesn’t stop the second review from looking like this:

This prompted me to both rant about the specific review and create a separate thread on the forum with some suggestions on how to improve the review system. Here it is in verbatim.

There’s been a lot of complaining about the review system, which from what I understand, has not changed since the beginning of time.

Here’s two things that I believe are both simple to implement and deals with our concerns:

* Have you created a Foundry mission and wondered “why has no one reviewed it yet?”
* Have you spent endless hours crafting a great mission… and wonder why it isn’t getting the attention it deserves?
* Have you crafted some cool Foundry tricks, map designs, dialogue, unique characters — and want players to know about it?
* Have you felt the wrath of torpid, useless Foundry ratings… and want a chance to vindicate your Foundry mission?

StarbaseUGC is producing a feature article on various Foundry authors with these dilemmas. To qualify:

– You have ONLY published one or two Foundry missions total.
– You have NEVER had any of your STO Foundry missions featured in an article, podcast, broadcast, or review.

Send an in-game mail message to Tucana with the headline “StarbaseUGC Foundry article NX-01” Please state your Foundry mission name(s). It does not matter what rating you’ve received for your missions. The age of the missions does not matter either. They can be recent ones, or released a year ago.

StarbaseUGC.com will respond back with details. Qualified authors will be interviewed via email about their mission for this article.

The article begins with the community-led “Klingon Awareness Week #2” event, then dives even deeper into Cryptic’s forthcoming “First Contact Day” event. Terilynn also provides an exclusive sneak peek at a NEW mission for the Klingon faction called “Alpha” which she was able to pre-test!

Massively is part of the Joystiq network of gaming blogs. The “Captain’s Log” column is published every Monday.

Many of us were first exposed to science fiction while watching television or going to the movies. This exposure probably encouraged quite a few of you to explore science fiction in its more sophisticated and literary varieties. In some ways, these two divides have been prevalent for many decades.

On the one hand, there is “hard” science fiction, consisting of very well-written and engaging literary fantasies, many of which explore complex social themes. From H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine to Frank Herbert’s Dune (and beyond), SF authors have used the genre to tell allegorical stories, with strong implications for how we view the present. Meanwhile, the science was clearly discernible from the fantasy. On the other hand, there has always existed a “softer” type of science fiction, meant mostly to entertain the “masses.” From Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon radio dramas to Star Wars (and beyond), these forms of SF offer eye candy, entertainment, and pure moments of thrill, wonder, and awe. Often, science is unnecessary for these tales, which puts them closer to the genre of fantasy.

Arguably some of the best science fiction, like Star Trek, occupied a middle-ground between these extremes. Indeed, in much of the existing literature on Star Trek, many of the actors make claims like: “Everything else was kid’s stuff. Star Trek was the first sophisticated science fiction on television.” These celebrities and other writers often look past the pure camp of a Shatner fight to celebrate “Let that Be Your Last Battlefield.” They also overlook ground-breaking shows like The Twilight Zone or Tom Corbett: Space Cadet.

I’ve never read a history of Trek that acknowledges the Galaxy years, when the majority of young men (and some women) got their SF fix primarily from magazines. This era has been called the “Golden Age” of SF, when over 20 varieties of niche magazines competed for an American (and European) audience, during the 1950s and 1960s. There were certainly many predecessors to Galaxy, such as the variety of Hugo Gernsback publications, like Amazing Stories, Science Wonder Stories, and Air Wonder Stories.Galaxy also had much competition with Astounding Science Fiction (later known as Analog), as well as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.continue reading…

For a living, I run a IT business from home. I profession is in working with the home family PC, I also educate the owners of the family PC of the dangers of identity theft, from pc being compromised. Plus maintenance to the PC too.

With the recent spick of STO Accounts being attacked and or hacked, I just wanted to share to everyone on some basic maintenance to help in prevention. continue reading…

Star Trek Online (STO) Community Moderator Suricata has pitched a fascinating “Ship Tier Revamp Proposal” within the official STO Forum site. The concept involves revamping the game mechanics to include two new ship items: warp core and computer core.

As Suricata indicated in his original STO Forum post (02-29-2012), “My idea is to basically revamp the entire system with the addition of 2 new ship items (the warp core and computer core), these items are responsable for the base stats of a ship. Ships would still get unlocked for use at the same levels as now, however, players would not be forced to change ships all the time as they rank up.”

The concept is intended as a comprehensive WIP (Work In Progress) with the hopes a future implementation by STO owners Cryptic Studios/Perfect World. A discussion is underway among STO members. The community is encouraged to voice their thoughts on the topic.

Hi all. Well it has been along time since I did a StarbaseUGC Log and with all the material I wish to add to this article, I feel it’s only fitting. For those who are new to StarbaseUGC, I’m the lost wolf, the hard copy reporter not scared to speak his mind, however have got allot softer with wisdom towards the game and player base. My StarbaseUGC Logs can be filled with all sorts of tid bits and foundry resource material or they can just be me talking about me and my opinion towards stuff. Well I work hard for foundry authors and feel I’m aloud every now and again.

So today we take a look at “The Foundry Till Now” a nostalgic look at the Foundry back on the TTS and what missions stood out to me and changed the way we conceive UGC within STO, “How Too… FOUNDRY” which is the title of my new planed livestream series, my first tutorial which looks at Map Transitions and my collaboration with STOmedia in order to get my Cryptic/STO Ezine of the ground. Enjoy!